This blog is dedicated to ALL things social media and as I am a true sharer of posts and tweets as I have been converted over the past few years.I wanted to share my thoughts and feelings.There will also be freeware and special offers available. Would like to add your software, gadget or write-up and share your thoughts and feelings? Then email me for a featured post to newsdesk@aceworldwideservices.com or to advertise sales@aceworldwideservices.com
Thank you, Ian {Editor}

Monday, 13 January 2014

#AceSocialNews says when the Smartphone one day becomes as smart as us, and we are no longer able to tell it what to do! Instead it will tell us how to do it!

Ace News Group posted: "Smartphones--Powerful Business and Consumer Tools "We were attracted to each other at the party, that was obvious! You're on your own for the night, that's also obvious... we're two adults." Alex Forrest, "Fatal Attraction," Paramount, 1987 The other ev"

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"We were attracted to each other at the party, that was obvious! You're on your own for the night, that's also obvious... we're two adults." Alex Forrest, "Fatal Attraction," Paramount, 1987

The other evening I left the office, got about a half block and had to pull a U-turn to go back for my smart phone.

I've left my billfold at the office a few times but never bothered to retrieve it … just drove a little more carefully the next morning.

Sure, I have a tablet and ultrabook at home that I could have used; but jeezz, it's my smart phone!

It's not like I'm addicted to it.

It's not like I sleep with it … silly house rules!

It's no wonder the smart phone has taken off so rapidly around the globe.

From almost anywhere, it enables you to be in touch with everyone, virtually anytime.

While the devices are subsidized by carriers in the Americas (O.K., there's a "service contract" attached, but still…) few other countries started down that dark path by letting you buy your device anywhere and giving you contract breaks on the volume of usage.

The device price limited some users' choices; but for a growing number of folks, it was a justifiable investment.

Worldwide Mobile Usage – Even though there are over 6B mobile phones in use around the globe, there are still a couple of billion who don't have their own personal communications device-- either because of the high cost or the desire to not be constantly connected. But with newer, low-cost smartphones, that will change rapidly by the end of next year.

The featurephone has slipped even in emerging countries as newer, cheaper devices enable everyone to be totally connected so they can fill in (read "waste") all their free time.

Really Now – Teens, Tweens will get their first smart phone from their parents by saying it will enable them to be more in touch and that they'll use the device in case of a problem or emergency. It's probably true, but they do a lot more with the smart phone day-in, day-out.

I call it "doin' stuff."

Shrinks obviously like to label all of our activities, so they say they're seeing an increase of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) in all sexes, all age groups so much that the tool that was sold to you as "the ultimate in productivity tools" is actually detrimental to productivity.

Funny, it doesn't take long for a person to almost act as though his/her life revolves around the phone--especially their business life, which is why your boss secretly loves your BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) activities.

In today's constantly connected world, only nine percent of business people say that the phone makes it hard for them to disconnect from work.

But then, in today's instant info/instant answer world, the two are so meshed we probably can't figure out where one begins, the other ends anymore.

But as Alex commented, "You play fair with me, I'll play fair with you."

ROI research found that:

65% of owners say that their phone makes it "a lot" easier to stay in touch with the customers, partners

28% say their phone has made it "a lot" easier to plan, schedule activities

26% say their phone has made it "a lot" easier to be productive while doing things like sitting in traffic or waiting in line

39% say people they know have complained because they don't respond promptly to phone calls or text messages

33% say people they know have complained because they don't check their phone frequently enough

Even class-action lawyers are beginning to realize BYOD is good for business -- their business -- so expect frivolous suits to begin hitting the courts.

Lines Blur

According to a recent Harvard Business School study, most companies don't have a policy regarding the use of your device for work during non-work hours. But it may be hard to prove because especially with smartphones all work, no play makes Jack (and Jane) a dull person.

Business, Etc. Tool – Smartphones have so many features designed into them that increasingly, we forget you can also make a call with them.

According to Flurry, of the 20B downloads that have been reported, the 10 most popular apps on smartphones are:

1. Email

2. Web browsing

3. Facebook

4. Maps/directions

5. Games

6. General search

7. Share/post photos

8. Read news, sports

9. Local search

10. Watch TV/video

Of course, lawyers will say that all of that mobile game time wasn't personal time, it just to keep your hand/eye coordination limber and ready for action.

Work Break – While no one will deny the productivity that is enabled by today's powerful smart phone, the first apps people download to their device – even before company apps – are games. Someone is playing because it's good business.

Carriers don't care because you're just racking up data minutes; and game app producers don't mind because money is money for them, whether you're at home or the office.

As Dan warned, "This has got to stop."

But increasingly, business spills over into almost every aspect of our lives and the compact, easy-to-use communications device is an invaluable tool.

Power Users – People who are constantly on-the-go don't want to be out-of-touch with business partners and friends. Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, is just one of millions of people who conduct business around-the-clock, around-the-globe.

In addition to being a valuable business tool, smartphones are becoming an indispensible part of our consumer activities.

When retailers first discovered consumers were using their smart phone to comparison shop in the store, the cry went out that the devices were going to kill brick and mortar stores.

Retail Relationship

That didn't last long, but the realization that the consumer was better informed has changed the retail landscape.

Mobile Shopping – Smartphones have been the first choice device for consumers searching for the right store, right product, right price.

You seldom go into a store where you don't see a growing number of folks shopping with their smart phone … fact/feature checking, price checking, review checking and the big favourite-- scoring a discount or digital coupon.

The smart phone is a powerful business tool and consumer tool and admit it … it's a symbol of a person's importance and status.

Don't believe me? Then why do you think people have to have them constantly at the ready:

In a movie theater - 35%

During a dinner date - 33%

At a child's or school function - 32%

In church or a place of worship - 19%

While in the shower - 12%

The young are so attached 20% of those 18-34 sleep with their device

12% said their smart phone gets in the way of that relationship

One in 10 adults said they used their phone during sex

That's probably why Alex said, "I love animals... I'm a great cook."

Hey … I'm dumb not stupid!

Connections

In 1960, computer theorist J.C.R Licklider said that in a few years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly.

We're getting pretty close according to an IDC study that found 80 percent of today's smartphone users check their device within 15 minutes of waking up.Smartphone Day – IDC said that 79 percent of their surveyed smartphone users have their device with them throughout their waking day. The perceived value makes the device and apps stickier and more valuable to users.

Seventy-nine percent have the device on or near them for all but two hours of their waking day.

One-fourth don't recall a time of the day when the phone isn't in the same room with them.

But really, in bed with them?

Doing stuff while in bed…really?

Doctor probably didn't realize what he said when he told Dan, "Whatever resentment she's feeling, she probably got it out of her system."

If you have a chance, catch CCE (Connected Car Expo) November 19, followed by the LA Auto Show (20/21) and cap it off with the January car show in Las Vegas.

You might call the January thing CES (Consumer Electronics Show) but forget the bangled wearables, the mobile devices of every shape/form/application, even content/data storage things.

Car companies will be showing really sexy, sleek, jaw-dropping stuff.

Probably the only way I'll get out of the North Hall is if they move some of the cars into the Central/South Halls.

If you're a true go-anywhere gamer, what Nvidia is showing at these shows will get you outta your room and into a new car!

Sure, they'll show the concept driverless, hybrids and electric cars; but it will still be about style, the glare of the gadgets and the apps as you sit immersed in the fantastic new car smell.

They weren't the first but the Galvin brothers delivered one of the first commercially viable radios (bearing the Motorola name) when they installed the $130 crate in a $540 Model A Deluxe Coupe.

Travel Companion – There's nothing worse than silence or talking to yourself when driving and you can thank the Galvin brothers for ensuring you have news, music, entertainment while you're on the road.

In addition to being a little pricey; the antenna covered the car's roof, the batteries were squeezed under the car seat and mammoth speakers were attached behind the seat.

The average car has about 70 computer chips and a big box full of sensors to keep track of just about everything. The car's 100 +/- ECUs (electronic control units) have up to 100 million lines of code.

It really is a mobile computer with a fantastic array of entertainment options, internet access and a growing list of apps that help you avoid traffic jams, find parking spots, locate coffee shops/restaurants and keep track of where you're going/where you've been.

Troubleshooting – Auto technicians today wear gloves, not to keep their hands from getting greasy but to work with the growing number of chips and sensors that need to be checked and updated. Hundreds of devices and millions of line of code now monitor, keep your car moving.

There's more to smart cars today than connecting a smart phone into the stereo.

Now, you have computers on the wheels and sensors tracking all sorts of data from engine temperature to speed and monitoring every conceivable aspect of your car's performance and the way you're treating it.

All of that data is available to your auto technician to diagnose the car's problems and issues.

That's the stuff you can't see; but your sales consultant (not salespeople anymore) will be happy to tell you about them.

Infotainment Options

What you will see is the elegant array of infotainment systems that consumer electronics firms are offering both to the auto designers/manufacturers as well aftermarket solutions to really trick our your ride.

All-in-One - Major CE firms like Panasonic now have a complete organization that designs, develops and markets complete infotainment systems to auto makers and for the aftermarket enthusiast. Filled with chips, sensors, programs and apps; the newer centers provide complete information on the car and the world around you and keep everyone in the vehicle as safe as possible.

The leading names in consumer electronics have major design/development teams that work closely with auto design folks, software teams and wireless mobile service providers.

And yes, they'll be there with the car folks at CCE, the LA Auto Show and CES.

After all, it's a big market and getting bigger, better, more connectable/more connected.

According to Gartner, global car sales will be in excess of 100 million units; and more than 35 million will ship with embedded mobile technology and someone's infotainment solutions.

Beyond the Dock – First it was the mobile phone plugged into the electrical system, then the smart phone wirelessly connected to the audio system. Today, the phone and its apps are an integral part of the complete auto environment that monitors the car (and driver) as well as ensures safe/secure travel.

Embedded mobile technology will outstrip alternative connectivity.

Only 21 million cars will have smart phone integration and 10 million with tethered solutions.

In-car infotainment services such as news, weather, social networking and music streaming will be sold with about 32.1 million cars (up from 4.3 million last year) and navigation services will be in 28.5 million cars in 2018, compared with 5.12 million last year.

Vehicle management applications -- remote diagnostics and maintenance -- will be in 14.8 million cars, compared with 5.5 million last year.

Assembly Line – The newest assembly lines in Detroit aren't found in cavernous factories but in coffee shops throughout the city, where programmers and designers dream up and develop chips, sensors, apps for the city's big iron.

Detroit Silicon

While the Motor City may be bankrupt, it's hard to tell there's a problem when you see all the brash new hardware/software/app organizations that are moving there to assist auto makers in delivering the mobile computing/travel experience you want.

Established CE firms, auto designers/engineers and the newcomers are busy working on:

Since folks spend an average of 15 hours a week in their car, one of the ideas your wireless carrier likes is streaming more stuff to you.

Moving Hotspot – Globally, mobile service providers are rolling out 4G LTE service to provide faster downloads of email, music and video entertainment for your smart phone and the increasingly smart car. The robust service will also allow a number of users in the car to stay in touch with whatever they need to keep in touch with.

The GSMA (Global System for Mobile Communications Association) and its wireless members are aggressively working to deploy 4G LTE high-speed service to meet the demands for in-car connectivity.

LTE Speed

They point out that LTE will improve in-car e-mail access, Internet connections, weather and traffic updates, video-conferencing and video streaming in addition to serving as a WiFi hotspot for everyone in the car.

That will enable you to make better use of Google Earth, Google Street View and online traffic information, as well as things like Facebook and Twitter.

Of course, all those computers, sensors, in-car networks and outside LTE capability aren't without their concerns.

Thousand Points of Touch – With all of its computer chips and sensors, newer smart cars also have the potential to be hacked/whacked for fun and malicious activity. It is an area that auto makers and security firms are aggressively working on to keep the car and its passengers safe.

As Cisco's John Chambers pointed out, the connected car will also have the potential of thousands of points of entry for hackers, whacker's and as Kaspersky recently dubbed them, cybermercenaries.

He said the high-speed, always-on wireless connectivity provides not only a new level of services but also a higher potential for distraction and malfeasance.

Or, as the narrator said, "Michael Knight, a lone crusader in a dangerous world."

Then there are the "little" issues:

- Do you buy your next car based on its OS?

- How do you pay for all those extra services and driver/rider benefits?

Don't worry, they'll work these issues out because according to Gartner's estimates, it can represent up to $20B in service revenues. That's not chicken feed! Gartner says what drivers really want is hands-free calling, navigation and automatic crash warning and maybe even car-to-car, car-to-infrastructure to manage traffic, prevent accidents.

Even as I drool at the car shows, I'm still going to need a lot of training to use it all especially since analysts are projecting in-car WiFi apps to grow eight-fold by 2019.

Or, I can be like Michael Knight and tell the car, "Keep your scanners peeled."

#AceSocialNews says this was a post by someone that sends us some great articles and posts to #AceNewsDesk and just says, if you like post, if not don't.

Ace News Group posted: "The Best Cloud is a Personal Private Cloud "The other five hundred and eighty-eight million turned into your dark seekers, and then they got hungry and fed on everybody. Everybody! – Neville, "I Am Legend," Warner Bros., 2007 On a recent trip "

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"The other five hundred and eighty-eight million turned into your dark seekers, and then they got hungry and fed on everybody. Everybody! – Neville, "I Am Legend," Warner Bros., 2007

On a recent trip I gazed out the plane's window as we flew over the clouds. It reminded me that most pilots fly over, under and around clouds … not in them. Even with all their technology pilots avoid clouds.

The rest of us fly blind.

We dump everything we can in the cloud because it's either cheap or free—in spite of

Heck, some of the newest smartphones are being offered with a whopping 128GB of storage, but

storage seems to be the one thing we can never get enough of.

Even though most studies show we use our go-anywhere, do-anything devices at home--where we probably have plenty of portable and server storage, people still want more capacity … just in case.

Volume Growth

Extra storage is needed because for some reason your content just grows and grows:

· Your music library is constantly expanding

· You keep adding more digital books you really want to read

· There are TV shows and movies you missed and you're going to watch as soon as you get the time

· There are personal/family photos

· You grab volumes of company/client/market research

· New gotta-have games, apps keep getting introduced

Home Content – With more than 3 B Internet users, smart phone sales surpassing 2B and 300+M tablet users, it's little wonder that the volume of content in the home continues to steadily grow. The challenge is to store, use and share it easily, safely.

A byte here, a byte there, it all adds up.

That's why storage is such a neat industry – flash is fast but expensive, HDs are big and cheap.

In the right combination … life is good.

And then there's the big fluffy cloud that will hold everything for you.

It's not only free or cheap, it's versatile. You can go there to share stuff, post great work, save things for tomorrow.

Cloudy Understanding

As much as people talk about and use the cloud, we were surprised by a recent study by Gartner that concluded most folks don't really understand what the cloud is or how often they use it.

Respondents said it was related to weather, pillows, drugs, toilet paper (?).

Many Millennials believed that stormy weather could interfere with cloud services.

Even though a lot said they didn't use it now, everyone said they would use it … someday.

It Is What it Is – Every company worth its salt has a cloud public, private, hybrid storage service. Even MS's departing boss Steve Ballmer gets excited when he talks about the beauty, the marvel of his company's offering. It's just really a big thing.

Even people who sell you cloud services have a tough time telling you exactly what it is, how it works, where it exists.

Neville warned, "You can't go running into the dark."

Cloud sales people usually end up saying it's big, it's good, it works.

Grounded Clouds – People talk about cloud storage and look up at what's passing overhead, but that content has to sit somewhere. To keep up with the growing storage requirements, firms are building bigger and bigger data centers around the globe.

To support all that digital activity, there are now more than three million data centers of widely varying sizes worldwide, according to IDC. More are being built every day.

People want their content on any device, without complications, restrictions.

The public/personal clouds have become popular places to store files, pictures, notes, content.

Despite their shortcomings and issues, according to IHS, cloud storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive will double their subscription base from 625 million this year to 1.3 billion in 2017.

Stuff Happens

I use the word services only "lightly."

I know sites will be out of service for a few minutes, few hours or even a few days because of hardware, software or human malfunctions.

Bad Guys/Gals Tools – Hackers and cyber thieves have gotten really creative and really good at being able to attack and harvest useful, profitable information from the cloud (of course so has social media). As good and as fast as security products are, they are still always one step behind those who want to do physical or fiscal harm with your data.

The thing that makes us shy away from their services is the fact that they're big, juicy targets for hackers and cyber thieves alike.

Penetration and theft happens so often it is not even news any more.

Your Problem:

All the cloud folks offer some protection but according to Trend Micro, cloud providers still say security is the customers' responsibility.

That's a big challenge for most of us.

You're probably "a little irritated" because of the National Security Agency (NSA's) activities, but every country has laws that allow government agencies free access to data in the cloud.

Even with tougher privacy laws than the U.S. has in place, other countries have anti-terrorism laws–cloud data/information access–that make the U.S.'s Patriot Act feel almost cuddly.

Government snooping is creepy, but online theft is just plain wrong and impossible to predict/protect against until after it happens.

Of course the Web 2.0 firms that tap all your info and sell it aren't real cool either.

The GM of HP's enterprise security products said even companies with well-trained security people will be victimized by data theft/loss.

"It's going to happen," he said. "It's inevitable."

At this year's computer security conference, John Chambers, chairman of Cisco, said the cloud is a "security nightmare" that "can't be handled in traditional ways."

And it gives new meaning to Neville's observation, "Social de-evolution appears complete. Typical human behavior is now entirely absent."

Added to that is the hassle of keeping files in sync that are on my tablet, ultrabook and office/home server.

Remote Options:

Rather that keep really important personal and business information in the cloud, products like Team Viewer are really great for working from almost anywhere over the iNet on files, materials on my home/office systems.

It works pretty well.

Of course, when you're across country or overseas, there's a terrific lag in response between the two systems.

Sending stuff to my remote device is fairly easy--as long as I remember to update the files in both locations.

Prestaging files in Dropbox or Google Drive and moving them back and forth is a nuisance and it turns out hackers and low-lifes love to hang out in big clouds that have tons of stuff they can dig through.

The best way around the problem is a VPN (virtual private network) that many companies deploy.

They set up their private network across the Internet so they can send, receive and share information safely and securely.

Personal VPN

It may not be "IT grade" but a good solution I've found for our family's devices and information is NTI's MiST that was recently introduced.

Personal VPN – Not as robust as a corporate-grade Virtual Private Network (VPN), NTI's MiST provides individuals, families and even small businesses the same ability of safely, quickly move files and content between the full range of home, office and personal devices to minimize the possibility of data corruption or theft.

We've loaded it on all of our devices – smartphones, tablets, ultrabooks, home server.

The kids like it because they can take photos/shoot videos with their smartphones and automatically load them on our home computer over our personal, secured file-sharing network.

There's no need to stop at the public photo/video site they use to use.

I've found it great for accessing files, presentations on my server and moving them back and forth when I'm working remotely.

The great thing is that the files automatically sync between the two devices so the one I look at is always current.

For about what Pandora costs me to stream music to my devices, I can still access/use the material located on our family's new WD 4TB home cloud.

I agree with Neville, "This is Ground Zero. This is my site."

If I was really paranoid–O.K. smart–I'd encrypt the files that I send and receive (encryption really ticks off government agencies); but I just don't think hackers/cyber thieves are that interested in locating my lowly family storage unit when there are big fluffy, juicy clouds out there.

I just avoid the public cloud as much as possible because I'm not as heroic as Neville when he said, "I can help. I can save you. I can save everybody."